


The Chandrasekhar Limit

by littledust



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-28
Updated: 2007-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-17 21:48:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledust/pseuds/littledust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lee and Kara, going supernova.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Chandrasekhar Limit

**Author's Note:**

> Post-Unfinished Business, with elements of Maelstrom thrown in. Infideliciousness took over my brainspace and then took a left turn at Albuquerque into dark, savage romance. Dedicated to [](http://fahye.livejournal.com/profile)[**fahye**](http://fahye.livejournal.com/), who made me watch the damn show in the first place.

_A second possible, but much less likely, mechanism for triggering a Type Ia supernova is the merger of two white dwarfs. In such a case, the total mass would not be constrained by the Chandrasekhar limit._

\--

She's told him she's missed him, so naturally she'll be avoiding him, so he thinks of the last place she would possibly be and then looks there first and she's _there_ and it's all so frakking convoluted but it has always, always made sense.

And here she is, at the gym, right in the center of the mat, glaring at it like one harsh look will erase his marriage from history. Nothing about her own marriage, but that's the problem, they're always three steps ahead when it comes to each other, leaping to all the right conclusions and taking off into space from there. Kara's a good pilot and she knows he won't want to cheat on his wife and he knows she'll never divorce and they both know it's all a spectacular blow-up waiting to happen and--

He blocks the punch she throws but the elbow to the chest is painful, right up against the heart.

"Kara," he says.

"I gotta go," she replies, and runs off somewhere with a door she can lock.

They've got all the fight out of their system and with no fists left to fly it's just sparks, sparks.

\--

There are orbits, paths that should not cross.

There are revolutions aboard the Galactica, a central hub of activity, a galaxy spiraling ever outwards. Life. Lee likes life on a battlestar (doesn't love it the way Kara does, though) and he does not believe that routine is necessarily the route to tedium, but he finds himself noticing the way he retraces every footstep, day after day after day. Quarters, Dee, corridors, million and one problems that come with being CAG, mess hall, Kara laughing pilots more pilots Dee and Dee's eyes and Dee's pain and for the first time in his life Lee Adama wishes he weren't attracted to intelligent women. Dee knows. Dee knows everything. He wants to kneel before her and apologize for himself, for everything, but he can at least spare her the effort of forgiving him. She would. He wouldn't even need to ask. And the guilt follows him through all the little circles he travels in.

Walking. There's Kara by her locker, holding her gods in her hands. Hers, not his. Maybe he should pray to Zeus, who never had much trouble with infidelity. He avoids Kara for now and thinks of Dee's hair, flight rotations, what the sun used to feel like when he was twelve. But there's this feeling of destiny, of falling in time.

He is ( _they are_ ) set on a collision course.

\--

The more and more he wants to be taken out of his head, the less and less he feels like drinking.

The same cannot be said for Kara.

He watches Kara and Anders (her husband)--that is how he thinks of him, first a name and then parenthetically titled--go from friendly ribbing to poisonous insinuation to throwing back shots like that will somehow fix everything, like all he has to do to win Kara's heart is outdrink her. And that's probably an uncharitable thought but it's all a hopeless case anyway, because Kara can hold her liquor like someone who has difficulty grasping her sanity. She holds all the attraction of a black hole, all crushing gravity and self-contained destruction, the painful beauty of self-annihilation. It's easy to see in the strut of her hips and the death in her smile. Easy to see Anders falling, falling still, about to be compacted until he's past meat and bone, all particles and heart beyond repair.

The jealousy is still appeased but unease sets in when Lee remembers Kara at the Academy, Kara in the air, the way everyone holds her in such awe because she flies like the perpetual adolescent, like someone who will never die.

Or like someone who wants to.

Lee ends up carting Anders back to Kara's bed because she's too falling-down drunk to do it herself. Innocent, helping out a friend, no reason for trembling hands. "You should stop outdrinking your husband," he says along the way, and _your husband_ shouldn't slide out so easily, oil on water, but it does and he could almost believe that nothing is wrong. Anders flops ungracefully into bed with a grunt when Lee lets go, and Lee's arms are vacant until they are full of Kara which is like being emptied (and empty) when viewed through an honest lens.

"Meant to give you a thank you kiss," she slurs, and licks the corner of his mouth instead, and _gods_ , it's so Kara it hurts, so of course Lee kisses her and she kisses back and the moonshine he tastes is acrid, acrid and unlovely and wonderful. Kissing sober is no different than kissing drunk, like falling out of an airlock but ecstatically.

"Put me to bed," Kara says, but passes out before she hits the pillow.

Lee wipes his face and thinks of holes in space, of holes in his heart.

\--

Gravity is a form of tension, the push-pull of two bodies with the right amount of mass, and it is also the anticipation, the tremble of the impacted seconds before landing. This is how Lee knows he should stay away from Kara one particular night, how he can close his eyes and feel her enter the room before she enters his field of vision, all swagger and gusto for her audience. Oh, Lee Adama goes where Kara Thrace does; five minutes after she shatters a glass rather than her mask, he's in place escorting her back to her quarters, an apology thrown to whoever she punched out this time. Lies upon lies, because the truth is one story they cannot tell, no matter how essential a fact and a force.

Gravity is no excuse for this, and yet the moment he drags Kara inside her room, her hands are at his belt buckle and his are on her face. _Yes._ Her tongue slides inside his mouth (ever the tease) and he tastes fire, the crash and burn possibility of flight, the knife-edge reality flaying soft and yielding futures. She moans his name. He grips her hips with both hands, his wedding ring no more than a piece of space debris caught in the explosion.

They are on the verge of frakking standing up, Kara's pants crumpled on the floor and her boots still half on, but then they manage to stumble backwards onto the bed, Lee's head thudding into the wall, though he's not sure that's why he's seeing stars, stars tumbling over and around Kara above him. She fraks like she flies, natural talent shot through with lunacy, the faintest traces of suicidal impulse. He never managed to get the rest of her clothing off so he presses his mouth to what he can find of her collarbone, tastes salt, the succor of this madness.

He comes and in a moment of perfect lucidity thinks: _I love her._

She follows a second later, jagged and sweat-streaked overhead, and they just breathe for a time, inhalation and exhalation, twinned motion. She says he should go the same moment he gets up to leave.

Their skies are falling.

\--

Friendship. The friendship is what they have been missing. Lee sits down to a game of cards with pure intentions, the need for it to be just like old times, just for once. Peacetime, she his best friend and his brother's girlfriend. Had it been wartime that made it all flare up like this, the explosive trigger for what Lee once named love? Trying to contain himself is like an attempt to bottle up the whole of the sun, but he tries, and he tries, and he reaches out in nothing more than comradeship.

Except this slows his thought processes down, here at the table, gives him time to notice how beautiful Kara is as she deals the cards and throws back her moonshine. He doesn't think about it usually, too caught up in the motion and reality of Starbuck, pushing forward, pushing backward, always pushing and spitting fire and leaving him behind--leaving him and then looping around back again, laughing at her own bravado. It's the face she likes to show the world, all the narrow world still alive on these few ships. But he's seen her weep and he's seen her rage and he's seen all the dimensions of Kara Thrace, can't stop seeing them even when she isn't there, sees her in bursts of light under his eyelids when he tries to sleep. Beauty enough to cause insomnia. Lee bows out of the game early, and watches.

Kara stops him from leaving with the others after it's all over (they fell for her bluff again). Her jaw is set. "Don't frakking stare at me like that, Lee," she hisses, and shoves him.

He opens his mouth to apologize (no use lying), but what comes out instead is, "Everyone already knows."

She swings at him, but he's had less to drink and dodges, lets her shift the tiniest bit off-balance and then pins her arms to her side with an embrace. "It's impossible," Lee says over her struggling, and the shake in his voice stops her. Impossible echoes back to him, all the permutations and ramifications and connotations. Impossible to deny, to hide, to be happy, to _live_. Impossible, all of it. Strange how he can live with the possibility of imminent death every day, and yet can live neither with nor without Kara.

"I frakkin' hate you sometimes," Kara says, but she's only tired, and her arms go around his waist. She's never been good at offering comfort, and all Lee can think of is how wrong it is to use her as a rock, to cling to someone so mad and desperate as though she holds everything safe in the known universe--and that's not much, not anymore.

"I'm trying so hard," he whispers to her hair, eyes closed, like praying to the empty gods except this is tangible, this is _real_.

"I know," Kara replies.

He thinks that is why she walks away.

\--

Dee's kiss against his cheek is careful as snowfall; her lips just as cold.

"How was your day?" she asks as if it's been any different from any other day, paperwork and rosters and responsibility that let him cling to sanity even while starving for another woman as he once attempted to starve himself of oxygen. They are chemically imbalanced, lacking atmosphere. Lee murmurs something nondescript and she shares a few small details of her own day, pearls falling from her mouth, the quiet dignity of a hearth goddess. He swore once to make a home with her, as though he could build anything on ash and bone. He and Kara have kept away from one another, but their emotions spiral out like galaxies, entwining to disastrous results.

Now Lee and Dee Adama undress for bed, the air supposedly clear between them, but it is only the transparency of the lies, soft like the breezes the Cylons stole from them along with their homes. Dee brushes out her hair and Lee thinks of Kara, bruised knuckles and bitter smile. There is unspoken brutality in the straight lines of his wife's shoulders, the way she tucks everything neatly below the surface, suffocates whatever words he might offer with a silence he cannot break. He embraces her from behind, a quiet _good night_ the only phrase capable of making it past his lips.

"Today was our anniversary," Dee says, pulling the sheet up to cover both of them.

So it isn't only Kara that can pull the air from his lungs, leave him breathless and wanting: wanting to ease the ring from her finger and the ghosts from her eyes, wanting release, release for _himself._ He is back again to a graceful tumble through space, suit torn and heart uncaring, his solace a vision of cool water that will eventually, blissfully close over his head. He has never been the man she married. Lee is sick with self-hatred.

"I'm sorry," he says, because it is all he can offer, however pathetic, and even then there is the part of him that is not sorry. Drowning in the coolness of space, lungs filled with emptiness.

They are not looking at each other. Feeling has fled also, perhaps in the company of the lies, and there are neat facts and decisions clean as scalpel incisions. Lee and Dee are always capable of rationality with each other, geometric lines of reasoning: _Our personalities are alike, we get along well together, this could be a good marriage, this is a farce, it is sometimes mercy to sever life support._ Dee's composure is her bridal (no, _funereal_ ) veil and he will not push it aside to reveal the grief and rage and love underneath.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," she says, and her hand is steady as she turns off the light.

\--

Those who can bring themselves to care about him after what he has done to Dee keep reaching out; Lee brushes them all off, seeking his salvation with Kara, with her in the locker room and her quarters and his room so recently stripped bare. He knows Anders has seen the finger marks on Kara's shoulders, finds himself staring at him in the mess hall, marveling at his capacity for survival. He was wrong: Samuel Anders can find his footing even in places choked with radiation. There is someone not even Kara can kill. If he notices Lee looking, he never looks back, never acknowledges anything. Better to ignore the abyss because it _does_ gaze back.

Lee cannot look at Dee at all.

His father is angry and disappointed again, for his son will not stop letting his life go to shambles, and this time it seems no one can pick up the pieces. No one asks Starbuck what's wrong, what's going on, even whether she wants to get a drink later. Her kisses are just as hungry as Lee's, her need just as yawning and desperate. It's just that they have different mechanisms for coping.

"If our ancestors were around, they would stone me to death," she murmurs, tracing the lines of fire she opened on his back with her fingernails. Lee closes his eyes and waits for her to elaborate on this non sequitur. She's been talking more and more lately, patterns of nonsense that sound disturbingly like prophecy when he has drunk enough to make his head swim. "For my crimes, for my sins. The gods don't smile upon those who break their vows."

He hates religion, suddenly. "You still won't divorce your husband."

The laughter that spills from her lips is shaking and fractured; he has damaged her again, ripped another piece away. At the very least they have equal effect on one another, one trembling moment of joy for every two shreds of their torn selves gone to more holes in space. There is so much space to fill, and it is never satisfied.

"The gods are going to strike me down. I was chosen for being such a frak-up." She chokes on that laughter and he crushes his lips to hers, but she pulls away, still talking. "I don't want to die. I don't want to follow the signs. No, Lee, come here. Stay. Frak you, stay!"

He always wants to leave when she gets this way, pupils dilated and body slack against him, but she calls him back again and again, because if they have to drag each other down, it might as well not be alone. No one ever told Lee that being in love still means falling into it, falling and falling until everything breaks.

\--

Lee screams Kara's name as her Viper goes up in flames, howling his grief into the uncaring vortex. One moment, and then there is no hesitation as he jerks his control to follow her, the blood pounding in his veins, his fingers on the pulse of the universe.

The ensuing flash of white light is like the birth and death of stars.


End file.
